Chapter 962, The Destruction of the Spirit Race

Chapter 962, The Destruction of the Spirit Race
Gu Hang's words silenced the person on the other end who was using the old woman's body to talk to him for a long while.

But he didn't think he had done anything wrong.

Based on what this 'God of a Thousand Faces' said, and the situation Gu Hang encountered when he tried to devour Komo's remnant soul, Gu Hang basically confirmed that this 'God of a Thousand Faces' was a god of the Spirit Race.

The Eldar, as a once dominant race that ruled the entire universe, naturally had their own racial gods at their peak. Based on human research into history, revelations from Eldar 'allies,' and the interrogations of some Dark Eldar prisoners on the Comoros battlefield, some clues have been obtained.

The term 'pantheon' may be a figurative number, but they do indeed worship a great many deities, covering almost every aspect of the Eldar's religious life.

But in reality, there is only one god. All those aspects are actually just one of the 'thousand faces' of a single deity.

The God of a Thousand Faces manifests countless forms with countless countenances. There is a desolate face wielding a crescent scythe to reap souls; there is a magnificent crown woven from countless threads to depict a star map; there is a chaotic silhouette shrieking and twisting amidst seas of blood and ecstasy… He uses these different countenances to respond to the different directions of the Spirit Race's faith.

Even the modern Eldar might not know this.

However, the condition of the Thousand-Faced God is clearly not very good.

As Gu Hang put it, they, or rather He, were complete losers.

He is the god of races, but the races He protects are on the verge of extinction.

This does not refer to any human attack on the Comoros.

Even without this incident, the Eldar in this universe would be nothing more than barely surviving. All their energy would be focused on how to stay alive; they wouldn't have any future or development to speak of.

They may still possess some powerful, ancient technologies. Perhaps their individual strength is still quite high, and they still maintain a highly advanced civilization.

However, they had no hope left.

If the entire race has reached this point, then what good is a Thousand-Faced God as a 'racial god'?

The Slaanesh, born from the corpse of the Eldar Empire, had long since destroyed Him, leaving almost nothing behind.

Today, the so-called thousand faces have been reduced to only two.

Windsor is one aspect of the Ark Eldar's faith, the so-called 'God of Hope'.

Mensha is one of the aspects of the Dark Eldar's faith, the so-called 'Tyrannical God'.

As for Como? That was also one aspect of him, the so-called 'God of Despair,' but it was long ago incomplete, leaving only a wisp of his soul, which was forged into the Como God Sword.

Of course, strictly speaking, the Many-Faced God is not finished; in fact, he has become stronger—if one is willing to consider Slaanesh as one facet of the former God of Pleasure.

Having devoured the vast majority of the Spirit Race's souls and the divine essence of the Thousand-Faced God, the 'youngest of the Four Gods' is, in a sense, more representative of the Thousand-Faced God than the one who now only has two faces.

How ironic.

In this sense, Gu Hang calling Him a loser is already being polite.

Faced with Gu Hang's sarcasm, the deity who had taken the old woman's body remained silent for a long time without replying.

Until Gu Hang started to get impatient.

He glanced at his watch and said, "Silence also counts. I have a lot to do. If you don't want to say anything, please leave."

The 'God of a Thousand Faces' let out a bitter laugh through the old woman's body.

"You really show no mercy."

"Then, please allow me to show you something."

The old woman slightly raised her hand, and a ray of light enveloped Gu Hang in front of her.

An endless torrent of illusions poured into Gu Hang.

With Gu Hang's abilities, he could easily reject these illusions.

However, after hesitating for a moment, he decided—since he was already here, he might as well take a look.

He saw the battlefield from billions of years ago, where magnificent Eldar warships were swallowed by a crimson vortex as they fled; and highly developed Eldar cities were dragged into the storm of the warp in an instant, forming the most basic components of a new divine kingdom.

In the divine realm of the Thousand-Faced God, the heavens were torn apart, and one after another, great demons, Slaanesh, emerged from the Pantheon. They came from the past, from the future, and most importantly, from the present.

The God of a Thousand Faces was driven out of the temple, and His body had long since been divided into countless parts.

Lacking the largest portion—the portion belonging to Slaanesh—they could never reunite, nor were they able to resist; they could only scatter and flee.

The claws of the great demon Slaanesh shattered the arrogant gods of Eldar one by one.

The remains of God fell into the eternal abyss amidst screams.

He witnessed how the surviving fragments of divinity drifted desperately in the eternal storms of the warp, colliding, tearing at, and vying for the remaining power of faith and concepts like cosmic dust. Finally, on the verge of complete annihilation, a shared, immense, and reality-distorting fear of death, originating from the depths of all Eldar souls, acted as the final bond, forcibly binding the largest fragments together.

This was not a rebirth, but a more desperate death imprisonment—a terrifying aggregate of hundreds of nameless, lowly consciousnesses took shape.

This is what Windsor and Mensha are today.

They bear the titles of "God of Hope" and "God of Tyranny," but in reality, they are nothing more than a disgusting Frankenstein's monster.

They eked out a living, escaping the pursuit of their formidable enemy, while simultaneously leading two groups of the Spirit Race to survive in different ways.

“We are not complete spirits… nor are we free wills… Every fall of my people, the Spirit Race… every tremor of the Soul Stone entering the net… tears at our false bodies…”

Countless fine, shimmering "threads" emerged in Gu Hang's expanded spiritual vision, extending out from the shattered core of the Thousand-Faced God, which was flowing with divine pus and blood.

Each one is as thin as a spider's silk, so fragile that it seems as if a single breath could break it, yet they pierce through the veil of space, casting a faint, despairing projection on the physical universe.

Following one of the "threads," Gu Hang's mind was immediately drawn into a distant, flame-engulfed star battlefield. A colossal ark world, elegant as a work of art yet riddled with wounds, was being relentlessly besieged by bloated, filthy, pus-oozing green warships.

Nurgle's plague missiles slammed into the Ark's pale light shield, blasting apart clouds of decaying psionic energy. Near a crumbling spirit bone spire at the edge of the deck, a howling banshee warrior charged, her battle cry piercing the void, her stardart spear aimed at the plague warriors who outnumbered her several times over.

But Gu Hang saw something deeper.

The moment her charging spirit reached its peak, the pure and resolute psychic energy emanating from the depths of her chest was not only the energy needed to activate the Star Dart Gun, but also a thin, blood-like stream of light that was being invisibly drawn away and rapidly flowing back along the thread connecting the Thousand-Faced God in Gu Hang's vision!
The tiny ray of light injected into the core of the Thousand-Faced God caused that area to light up briefly before being swallowed by the deeper darkness, as futile as a starving, dying person trying to draw a drop of rain.

At the same time, tens of thousands of identical threads rose from every corner of the battlefield, from the souls untouched by the war deep within the Ark world, and even from the undiscovered Eldar colonies at the edge of the galaxy, with billions of streams converging on the collapsing divine core.

Gu Hang frowned amidst the myriad illusions; receiving so much information at such a high speed was somewhat stressful for him.

But he still realized what all of this really meant: every extraordinary individual of the Eldar, every time they squeezed out their own potential to release power, seemed to be instinctively using the purest flash of their soul to briefly "ignite" this dying embers of divinity in exchange for the "divine grace" that amplified their power, but they were also unconsciously tearing themselves apart, turning into fuel to keep this "divine body" alive.

This seems to be a perfect cycle.

The Many-Faced God provides the Eldar with power and protection, preventing their dead souls from sinking into the Warp and being captured by the Slaanesh, and instead returning them to the sanctuary provided by the Many-Faced God.

For the Eldar of the Ark, it is a 'Soul Stone,' residing in the spiritual world of the Ark; for the Dark Eldar, it is a Soul Chest, a chance to be resurrected once again in a new body created by the Bloodwalkers.

Meanwhile, each of their intense outbursts, and even their final deaths, fed back their experiences and soul power to the God of a Thousand Faces, allowing it to continue operating.

However, if this whole mechanism were truly so perfect, they wouldn't have ended up getting worse and worse over hundreds of thousands of years.

The biggest problem with this mechanism lies with Slaanesh.

This formidable external enemy, a true terror looming over the entire race, made the entire cycle unsustainable.

“Deeper corruption…is flowing against the current along this blood vessel…” Gu Hang heard a low, hoarse voice, as if a thousand voices were superimposed together.

He saw that the shimmering light that had been drawn away contained something more sinister and viscous.

On the battlefield, the howling banshee warrior's psionic attacks did indeed seem more intense, but the abnormal blush on her skin and the strange, inappropriately sweet murmurs that mingled with her battle cries instead of her usual shrieks...

When the Eldar unleash their immense power, even with numerous protective measures, they inevitably connect with the Warp. That is the source of all supernatural power, regardless of race.

What makes the Eldar special is that every time they make contact with the Warp, they always attract the attention of the Slaanesh.

Even if they only get a little bit of it, it may not have any impact on their entire lives.

However, when they die and return, both the Soul Stone and the Soul Box receive the purest souls. Where do the remaining impurities go?

"The Dark Prince... Slaanesh's gaze... is like cancer... eroding along every single soul channel connecting me to the Eldar..."

“Every agonizing struggle and wailing at the soul level accelerates His all-pervasive infiltration… Our ‘divine cores’ are already filled with His ‘pleasure’… Every painful spasm pleases Him, every burst of power nourishes His penetrating tentacles… If we do not sever… if we do not eradicate… the ending is already sealed… We, these divine zombies, will become a gigantic festering sore He projects upon the real universe! And all the Eldar souls connected to this will…”

“Sever…this self-destructive cycle…” A relatively clear voice, with a sharp and resolute quality, briefly drowned out the billions of wails of the Thousand-Faced God.

Gu Hang's gaze was strongly drawn to the source of the sound—a large fragment located deep within the divine core, exhibiting a sharp, deathly pale color, like the purest form of tyranny, radiating a chilling aura that rejected everything.

That was Mensha's part. He was the one who kept the Many-Faced God from completely dissolving and decaying under Slaanesh's plague of pleasure. He was also the one who guided the Dark Eldar to survive in the Comoros, teaching them to resist Slaanesh's soul-draining through pain.

At this moment, however, Gu Hang keenly observed that a nauseating, malicious iridescence was slowly climbing along the edge of Mensha's fragments—Slaanesh's deadly poison was greedily licking this last bastion.

At the same time, Gu Hang also saw some things that the Thousand-Faced God had seen in his mental vision: the golden will network representing the human empire was like a giant net spanning the galaxy, with countless nodes dimming or flickering under the erosion of chaos. And above the golden network, a blue network grew, intertwining with the golden network and binding one-third of the human world.

That golden light must represent the human emperor. Or rather, the shared faith built by countless trillions of humans, the current dominant race in the universe.

The blue network should represent Gu Hang, or rather, his alliance. That spiritual resonance, built upon the foundation of the human empire and symbolizing a higher level of shared ideals, order, and sacrifice, is a colossal entity spanning the stars and built upon an unbreakable system and shared imagination.

(End of this chapter)